Title: Proactive location-based context aware services using agents

Authors: Muthuswamy Vijayalakshmi, Arputharaj Kannan

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, 600025 Chennai, India. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Anna University, Guindy, 600025 Chennai, India

Abstract: In recent years, there is a growing interest for location-dependent information services among mobile users. Mobile phones are used by most of the users not only to communicate, but also to access the information they need from every place and at anytime. In this article, we introduce an agent-based approach to provide location-dependent and context aware services proactively, which are always relevant to the user|s context to provide a complete satisfaction of Location-Based Services. The services are based on the location of the user, the activity that he is involved in at a particular instance (based on user|s daily planner), his profile (interest) and the time at which the data is retrieved. This proposed approach also identifies the entities that are more feasible for providing profile data, and a decentralised solution using mobile agents that act intelligently to retrieve all related information for the user|s planned activity. Moreover, an efficient caching mechanism called |History and Priority-based approach| that provides the user with context-oriented data periodically and a cache replacement policy called |Profile based, Target-Driven Cache Replacement Policy| which filters unwanted data from the cache that is not useful for the user has been proposed in this article.

Keywords: LBS; location-based services; location-dependent queries; mobile communications; mobile computing; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; MAS; mobile agents.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2009.022443

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2009 Vol.7 No.2, pp.232 - 252

Published online: 05 Jan 2009 *

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